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OPINION

Guest columnist: Push-button politics are a trap for us all

Last month North Carolina outlawed, yes ‘‘outlawed,’’ its local governments from having the right to set minimum wages for workers. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Republican-controlled North Carolina Legislature voted to overturn transgender person’s rights to use the restroom of their choice. Wow.

Just how low does North Carolina have to sink? Wait, this is just another ‘’push button’’ issue, and yes, liberal Democrats are falling for the trap yet again. How do you get people to vote ‘R’ in the North Carolina, the South and elsewhere? Tell them immigrants will take their jobs. Tell them the government will take their guns. Tell them that “family values’’ will be corrupted by gay rights or same-sex marriage. Tell them Obama is weak (code for “we don’t like a black man in the White House”). Tell them women do not have the right to “kill’’ humans with abortions. Tell them transgender citizens will rape and pillage you and your children in public restrooms. Get the picture? It’s called a ‘‘brain freeze’’.

Republicans frame the ‘’push button’’ issues to excite the masses with poison while deflecting criticism to their failed employment policies, protecting Wall Street, giving tax breaks to hedge fund (corporate welfare) managers that are double the social welfare budgets and fighting even the concept of a minimum wage.

On the flip side, Republicans promote the myth, through their paid minions, of the wonders of the free market - a free market that has produced the worst inequality in this nation’s history since the late 19th-century robber barons like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Carnegie had free rein to monopolize key sectors of the U.S. economy. A free market led by Wall Street that virtually destroyed our economy in 2008. Republicans’ use of smoke and mirrors works when you have a population that has been shortchanged on education and bolstered with religion. Faith vs. reason is why so many vote against their own interest when they are devoid of the latter.

So North Carolina, you now lead the nation in promoting ignorance and intolerance to advance the economic interest of the corporations and the 1 percent while using ‘’the law’’ as your veneer to legitimize your policies. From President Nixon’s use of the drug war as camouflage to incarcerate millions of blacks as a racial plan to destabilize the left to the hijacking of our laws to legalize your power, the game is up: we see through the Republican smoke and yes, this time, the people will regain the real freedom you have so corrupted in this country and the world.

Dr. George D. Pappas is an immigration attorney in Asheville/Hendersonville.